The ease of the poem, the crisp Anglo-Saxon which it uses, the forthright stating of the case for the weaker side, and the humanity underlying it, are admirable; and, further, from an artistic standpoint it is a stronger piece of work than it would have been had its philosophy chimed better with modern thinking. The unsuccessful are speaking; their view-point and not necessarily the author’s is presented. To have tacked on a clause additional, with a hint of the inner laws that govern success, might have saved the philosophy from impeachment as to falling back upon Providence; but it would have been a decidedly false note put into the mouth of the unsuccessful. We may say at once that
The men ten-talented who still Strangely missed of the goal,
were the Amiels who suffered paralysis of the will to benumb them, rather than those whom it was the will of the Creator to “harrow in soul;” but it would scarcely be expected of the Amiels themselves to analyze their deficiencies thus openly to the multitude. Impotence of will, however, is not at the root of all failure; who can deny that there is
The clan of those whose kin Were a millstone dragging them down;
The hard-luck folk who strove Zealously, but in vain;
who put forth apparently more effort to score than did many of the victors, but who were waylaid by some invidious circumstance, or who failed to “grasp the skirts of happy chance” as the flying goddess passed them?
Mr. Burton’s poem is too broad to discuss in the limits of a brief sketch; it would furnish a text for the sociologist. All the complexities of modern conditions lie back of its plaint, which becomes an arraignment. One feels that if God be not within the shadow, he should at least have given Responsibility and Will surer means of keeping watch above their own. The Omaric figure of the Wheel “busied with despite” rises before one as a symbol of this whirling strife where only the strongest may cling, and where the swift revolving thing, having thrown the weakest off, makes of them a cushion for its turning; or, in Omar’s phrase, “It speeds to grind upon the open wound.”
This is the apparent fact; but within it as axle to the Wheel is the law upon which it rotates, the law of individual choice. Each was given his supreme gift; his word was whispered to him; if he failed to hear it, or heed it, or express it in the predestined way, the flying Wheel casts him to the void, but the law is not impeached thereby. Outside this law, however, as spokes to the Wheel, are the innumerable radiations of human laws and conditions, so that one may scarcely obey the primary command of his nature if he would, and often loses sight of it as the principle upon which his destiny is revolving. Mr. Burton’s poem goes beyond the cold-blooded outlook upon the unsuccessful as merely those who are cast from the Wheel, and presents the truer view that they are by no means always the incompetents or degenerates:
